


Biting Your Own Neck

by toujours_nigel



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-09
Updated: 2013-06-09
Packaged: 2017-12-14 10:12:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 4,094
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/835741
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/toujours_nigel/pseuds/toujours_nigel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>written for rs_games 2012</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

The Grim is not without reason a sign of impending death—the form it takes stirs fear in the human mind, mingling the inherited terror of the unknown dangers enfolded in darkness with our wary suspicion that we have only incompetently tamed those dangers. The Grim is a creature of teeth and darkness, and more potent in being a dog than in any other form, for is not Death itself similarly deceptive, unexpected like a beloved dog fastening its teeth around its master’s throat? A masterless dog, wandering in the darkness.  
Anastasia Wormwood, _Signs and Sights of Death_ , Nuneaton, Oracle Publications, 1852, pg.36

 

The black dog came up the hill very slowly, favouring his right forepaw, nose to the ground. At the crest of the hill he looked around, ears coming up from their habitual droop. His long, ragged tail lifted itself and wagged once before retreating to the earlier half-mast. His shoulders squared and his nose came down again, but now he proceeded faster, a little less cautious about the thorn in his paw. Two little girls, aged five and eight, only succeeded in beguiling him from his path for a few minutes before he wriggled away from under their patting hands and continued onwards, though a boy a little older than them had distracted him for hours earlier in his journey.   
  
The younger girl, who had been asking for a puppy for days on end, tugged her sister’s hand and said plaintively, “Do you think Mummy would let us keep him?”  
  
The elder, trying to gauge the dog’s destination, said, “He’s too old, Susie; he’d fight with Roger.” Roger was their aunt’s German Sheppard, who was still growing into his paws and had a tendency of fighting with every dog he came across. “Besides, I think he’s going down to the Lupin house.”  
  
Susie, who liked Mr. Lupin, brightened up a little at that. “What do you think his name is, Jen?”  
  
The dog unerringly took the fork in the path that led to Mr. Lupin, and Jen exhaled a satisfied little sigh and reached down to take Susie’s hand. “I don’t know, Susie,” she said. “Come along now, Mummy’ll be worried.”   
  
The dog had stopped to stare at up-trail at the children till they disappeared around a bend in the road, and now walked a few slow steps to the lightning-blasted oak that marked the end of the commons and the beginning of the—exceedingly modest—Lupin freehold. For a moment, as he snuffled the air, the earth around the massive trunk, it seemed as though he smiled a canine smile of satisfaction. In a moment more, after he had marked it with his scent, he barked in a satisfied manner. His tail, the last few paces to the little cottage resting at the base of the valley, was raised up high and his pace was positively jaunty.  
  
The door of the cottage opened before he had even raised a paw to scratch against the wood, and Mr. Lupin smiled down at him while moving aside to let him enter and cast the world a wary glance before closing the door again, and taking a wand from his pocket to seal the wards.  
  
When he turned back towards the room, the dog had disappeared, and in his place stood a tall, thin man with long, matted black hair. He was nursing one hurt hand, the wrist cupped gently in the palm of his left. “I wasn’t followed,” he said, and laughed. “Well, except by two little girls just outside your door, who were debating taking me home with them.”  
  
Something eased in Remus, almost imperceptibly, as he stowed his wand back out of sight. “The Bretts, I suppose. Well. You were always the charmer, Padfoot.”  
  
“We can’t all be blessed with shy, professorial charm, Moony.” Something about the sentence struck him as false and he frowned. “That is what we used to say, isn’t it?” Remus ducked his head, eyes hidden behind the fall of hair that was altogether too grey, and that struck him as worse. “It doesn’t matter,” he managed. “Memory’s like a sieve these days, forget my own name next.”  
  
“Rot.” There, that was better, Remus smiling, moving easily up towards him. “You’re too much the peacock ever to do that. What have you done to your hand?”  
  
“Hurt it in Winchester trying to get away fast.”  
  
Remus stopped with his hand an inch from Sirius’, shaped already to the curl of his fingers. “I thought you weren’t followed?”  
  
“Only by children. Moony, it’s alright. A boy fed me and played with me and wanted me for a pet.”  
  
“Did he tie you up?” Remus’ voice was bland, almost amused, but there was, where their hands touched, a tremor beneath the flesh. If he looked beneath his clothes, there would be angry welts caused by manacles; it had been the full a week ago, while he skirted around the Malfoy estate.  
  
“Nothing like that. Memory’s like a sieve, thought for a while I was a dog.” Moony, who had howled to the night with a human throat when they were young, nodded slightly and set the tip of his wand to the foci of pain, running it gently over his knuckles. The skin glowed eerily orange for a minute. Sirius, who had never been able to look at healing wounds, took in the interior of the cottage, and said, surprised and ashamed of it, “You’ve been expecting me.”  
  
“Albus suggested I obtain a pet, in his last letter. I almost thought he meant it.”  
  
“He might have done.” It was good country for a dog that went hunting on his own, craggy and full of small animals and interesting scents. “And a wizard’s life is bad enough without adding a fugitive’s to it,” he added, only later realising he’d lapsed into silence in-between.  
  
“You’d get bored chasing your own tail,” Remus said, dropping his hand. It didn’t hurt anymore. “Tell me what you’re here to tell me.”  
  
He didn’t remember, but that sounded like he’d heard it before: Remus sitting at a desk filing reports for the Order. “Voldemort’s back,” he said, and needed to look around for a chair.  
  
“How do we know that?”  
  
“Harry was there. It happened at the end of the Triwizard Tournament; he and another boy got transported to a graveyard. The other boy got killed, Harry was saved by the spirits of Voldemort’s victims.”   
  
There, bland and exact. He still felt, if he thought about it, the shuddering curve of Harry’s shoulder under his hand, the temptation to tuck his body into the crook of an arm and pretend at protection. But it was cruel to tell Remus any of that, and very likely unwelcome. “I’ve been telling people since.”  
  
“You left me for the last.” He thought, looking at Remus, that switching out of Padfoot had been a mistake: the dog would have been better able to read the preternatural stillness of his stance, the care with which he held his body.  
  
He said, human-blind and human-awkward, “Dumbledore asked me to lie low here for a while. If you’d rather I left I think those girls might want me. I’m a very good dog.”  
  
That worked in some way he hadn’t expected; the tension went from Remus’ shoulders and he grinned weakly. “Rot, Padfoot. I went grocery-hunting for you.”  
  
“Well, if you went to so much trouble, I expect it would be less than civil not to stay.”  
  
“Dry up, will you? Come on, I’ll draw you a bath, I’m surprised Jen let Susie touch you, you’re filthy.”  
  
“Oi, I took baths in streams on the way.”  
  
“Rot,” Remus said again, decisively, and walked into an inner room. Sirius, trailing behind, thought it had been for the best that he hadn’t stayed a dog: his tail would have most decisively betrayed him.


	2. Chapter 2

To the interested scholar, the difference between the werewolf and what might be for the sake of ease in understanding be termed the 'true' wolf lies not so much in physiognomy as in psychology. Admittedly one can only imagine what lies in the mind of the wolf, but in the werewolf one can observe a rather fascinating split between what might be termed the human and lupine mind, which manifests most prominently in the black-outs experienced by many lycanthropes when they transform into their predatory selves but evidence of which can be found also in their 'human' lives; it is this very split that causes werewolves to be maligned in wizarding society, and it is impossible even for the most tender-hearted liberal to argue that such maligning is proof of unreasonable phobia—certainly it is not the wolfish form that is found repulsive, as the existence and honoured status of Animagi proves indubitably, but the very animal lack of control exhibited by the lycanthrope. A werewolf while 'human' might pose as, and even believe himself to be, a respectable member of any reputed society, but will, while the moon is full in the sky, still revert to a slavering animal.

Valeria Highsmith, 'An Inspection of the Mental Condition of Lycanthropes', _The Dai Llewellyn Journal, Vol 32, no. 3_ , 1934, pp. 41-67

 

Remus had been expecting him. It showed unexpectedly, in the crockery laid out for him that smelt of long confinement, and the freshly laundered sheets, and in the piles of veg and baskets of eggs in the kitchen, and the newly-baked bread Remus unwrapped from its sheets of paper after he had emerged from his bath.  
  
“Much better,” Remus said as he came into the kitchen. “How long had it been?”  
  
“About a week, I think. What day is it?”  
  
“Saturday.”  
  
“Ten days, then.” The entire last leg of his journey; he had run to Remus like a pointer spell turning north. “I’ve gone longer without.”  
  
“Oh, I remember. Sit down, Padfoot. Eat.”  
  
He obeyed—always the good dog, for Moony and for Prongs—and tore a scrap of crust from the loaf, set it upon his tongue while Remus watched. It felt like memory. “I used to like this, didn’t I?”  
  
“We raided the kitchen for it; James wanted marzipan, Peter wanted sandwiches, and you wanted pumpkin bread.”  
  
Sirius nodded, tore off and consumed another bite of the bread, then said on a wave of memory sweet on his tongue, “You wanted apples, always.”  
  
Remus stilled again, the predatory waiting that was beginning to make itself known as familiar even to his human mind. “The elves brought apples to my office, the first day I was back. They remembered.”  
  
“They ought to,” he said. “The common room still looks the same; they’ve still got the table you used to play chess at.” When he had met Harry there at night for a minute it had been unclear in his mind that he wasn’t seeing James; they looked very like.  
  
Remus looked on the verge of saying something, and then abruptly bent his head to shell the basket of eggs in front of him. “Well, they did build to last in the old days.” He wondered where the chess set had gone: Remus had carried it faithfully from home to school to their shared first flat; he remembered pitching the black king out of the window in the aftermath of one long-drawn argument that had devolved into him screaming at an increasingly hunched-in Remus.  
  
Impossible to mention that. Instead he asked, “Do you still put mounds of garlic in your scrambled eggs?” Remus’ face, startled out of its already familiar blankness, gave him all the answer he needed: he hadn’t been sure he’d remembered it right. “Vampires really aren’t anywhere near common.”  
  
“I’ve met seven.” Remus got up with the bowl of eggs. The stove began to heat itself at a muttered word. “You’ll have to excuse my caution.”  
  
Sirius felt somehow suddenly very young; a strange occurrence these days, when he felt every moment as though he’d lived a hundred years. But Remus had been out in an indifferent, cruel world while he’d been entombed in stone: it was the difference between living and merely remaining. “Yes, Professor. Moony?”  
  
“Yes, Padfoot?”   
  
Above his head, cloves of garlic were peeling themselves in mid-air. Sirius, who had never been very competent with household magic and had always held his mother in some awe for her proficiency in it, took a moment to remember his question. “How was Harry as a student?”  
  
“Not too far above average in most subjects, I gathered. Something of Prongs’ dab hand at Transfiguration, not bad at Charms; abysmal at Potions though I’m not sure whether to blame the instructor for that. But he had an aptitude for Defence, certainly.” He poured the eggs into a pan and shook his head. “Very careless of the cost to himself.”  
  
“His Patronus is a stag. When I saw it, for a moment I’d thought it was Prongs.” He’d assumed, in that breathless moment held close in the Dementor’s arms, that he’d died already; it had clarified certain confusions entirely: he’d found he wanted desperately to live.  
  
“I think he might have thought the same. Can you fetch the plates?” Remus piled scrambled eggs on both their plates, scrapes the burnt garlic from the pan and set it atop Sirius’ eggs with a smile of pure malice that would not have looked out of place on his twenty-year-old self. It still fit him, and that made Padfoot want to sit up and wag his tail.  
  
“I met Arabella,” he said instead, going back to his place and setting the length of the room and table between them. “She’s still living near the Darlings.”  
  
“Dursleys, and I know you know that, so stop desecrating literature for your own amusement, Padfoot.” Remus thumped a pitcher of milk on the table as punctuation, and moved aside to let the cups trailing him settle gently beside it. “What did she say?”  
  
“We talked about her cats, largely.” There hadn’t been anything to say about Harry. “Moony, these eggs are terrible.”  
  
Remus looked openly, miserably surprised: more emotion that Sirius had seen him admit to yet. “You used to like them.”  
  
Half an hour ago, he would have found that worrisome, but he remembered now how Remus’ fingers twitched in lieu of his mouth when he was playing one his rare pranks. “Moony, I’ve eaten rats that taste better.”  
  
“One should never underestimate the succulence of a good rat, plump on vermin,” Remus said gravely, inclining his head just enough to hide his smile.  
  
“I rather think rats are vermin,” Sirius said, and then they were both laughing. It made the kitchen feel a safe place as nothing till then had quite done: a place where Remus was at ease.  
  
“You realise you can’t eat Peter when we catch him, don’t you, Padfoot?”  
  
“Harry brought me food when he came to see me,” he said. It felt something perilously close to absolution, to be able to know what Remus meant when he spoke of something trivial: when they were young, he had taken it for granted that he would always know.  
  
“He’s a good lad,” Remus said, and then, exasperatedly, fondly, added, “drink your tea before it gets cold, Padfoot.”


	3. Chapter 3

The condition of the invert can now be discussed at some length, in order to ensure that your child has no confusions regarding the extent and gravity of the disorder. The wizard, or indeed witch, so afflicted might find themselves physically incapable of propagating children, or even of engaging in coitus with a member of the opposite sex, such that the wizard finds himself incapable of attaining and maintaining an erection and the witch remains lamentably unaroused. They might, however, simply find such acts distasteful, or even revolting, though retaining the physical capacities for performing coitus. Rather, they choose to withdraw from their social responsibilities, and from the welcoming world, and instead seek the intimate company of those of their own sex.  
Esmerelda Doaid, _Wands and Holsters: telling your child about sex_ , Huddersfield: Lunar Publications, 1967, pp 102-103

 

  
He woke with light shining in his eyes and the shadowed outline of Remus lurking behind an outstretched wand; the echo of a scream still rang faintly through the room. “Did I wake you?”  
  
“No, it was the banshee who lives in the next valley. Budge over.” The mattress sank a little beneath his weight and Sirius found himself for the first time aware that Remus had grown from the lanky boy he’d known, that he’d grown into the long fingers and great, stooping shoulders.   
  
“Just go to sleep, Moony; I’ll be alright.” He couldn’t remember what had woken him, but his voice was hoarse from screaming: probably Dementors, that was usually a recurring dream.  
  
“I’m planning on it,” Remus said, and unfolded his full length on the bed.  
  
“I meant in your own bed,” Sirius hazarded after Remus had shuffled around and made himself comfortable, patting pillows and dragging the sheets up above his shoulders: he had always felt the cold more than Sirius, had always hogged the covers.  
  
“This is my own bed. Sleep, Padfoot.” After another minute, Remus sat up wearily and said in the formal tone of resentment, “I’m not the one who kicks in his sleep.”  
  
“Just the one who steals every scrap of the bedclothes.” But it was better, with Remus’ bulk between him and the world: a close darkness of breath and body. When they had been at school, they used to sleep in heaps of flesh on the mornings after the full moon; later, he and Remus had slept like this, bracketed close under the covers. He could not remember where they had lived, but he thought, before slipping back into treacherous sleep, that they had been happy: he could remember very little of their life together.  
  
He woke in the morning with Remus staring amusedly at him, their faces very close together. “I’m glad to see prison hasn’t affected that,” he said, and began the task of entangling them from each other and the covers.  
  
“I was dreaming of Martina Purbeck,” he said, unable to even pretend at the lie. “You remember her, used to be a Harpie, legs for miles.”  
  
“Not my area of interest, either of them.” Remus frowned, untwisting his torso from the bedclothes; his shirt rode up, exposing pale skin and a long, puckered scar. “And you’ve only ever liked Quidditch as long as I’ve known you. Go back to sleep; I’ve got to get some work done. I’ll wake you in some time.”  
  
Fifteen years ago, Sirius thought, they’d have had a fight—the fights were what he remembered, and they’d fought viciously about everything. His right hand had begun to hurt again, had been trapped under Remus while they slept; he held it carefully away from his body as he slept.  
  
When he woke again it was late afternoon; a full day since he’d come snuffling down the hill, devouring Remus’ scent. In the outer room, Remus had transformed his cot back into a desk and was stooped over it, writing busily. When they were fifteen, Remus had suddenly hit one growth-spurt after another, shooting up six inches in as many months; he had been a small, sickly child and it had been strange for Sirius to realise that he couldn’t shield Moony anymore. It had turned something sour within him.  
  
“I’d forgotten how deeply you sleep. Sit for a minute, I’ll get you some tea.” Remus was out of his seat before he could protest that he was full; that his stomach had shrunk in twelve years of prison gruel; that he had never liked tea: but that, at least, could never be said.  
  
“Did I kick?”  
  
“My shins will never recover,” Remus called from the kitchen. “And your elbows have turned fatal.”  
  
Sirius sat listening to the quiet sounds of Remus making tea; night before last he’d slept in a ditch, curled tight with his nose tucked beneath his left paw, and last night in a bed with Remus wrapped around him, body exuding warmth. It was difficult not to hope; he’d been told to stay with Remus: he only needed to be a good dog and obey orders.  
  
Remus, shouldering back into the room followed by a laden tray, frowned at him. “There isn’t any news you’re keeping to yourself, is there, Padfoot?”  
  
“I had to shake hands with Snape,” he offered to allay suspicion, and found himself shuddering quite genuinely at the memory of it. “Slimy little git.”  
  
“He’s nearly as tall as you are, now. And you’re neither of you schoolboys anymore.”  
  
Difficult to explain, to rational, quiet, Remus, how his dislike of Snape had nothing to do with their ages, and how very much he’d resented having to touch him. Two years with nearly no touch, and the Dementors before that; he’d hated the curl of Snape’s fingers around his when they still remembered the shape of Harry’s shoulder. Instead he said, with indecent relish, “Nearly.”  
  
Remus sighed and pushed a full cup towards him, and set a dish heaped with steamed vegetables between them. “You can always eat rats for protein; don’t grimace.”  
  
“It was a joke,” he said. “Not about the rats, that’s true enough. This morning, about Martina Purbeck; it was a lie, but it was also a joke.” He looked up, tried to arrange his face into a smile. “There was never much call to make jokes in Azkaban; I’m afraid I’ve lost my talent for it.”  
  
“You hadn’t much to lose in that respect.” He stabbed at a floret of cauliflower with apparent relish. “Of course I know it’s a lie, Padfoot. Had you forgotten?”  
  
“Were we happy?” The shock of embrace in the Shack had startled him into a species of affectionate recognition, but nothing in the memories he’d retained had helped him believe even in contentment.   
  
The way Remus was staring at him, a spear of baby corn skewered on his fork, gave him greater hope. “You were my dearest friend, and then you were my lover. We fought, and in the end we trusted each other too little. But we were happy. We lived in your Uncle Alphard’s flat, and I worked at Flourish and Blott’s, and you brought me flowers in the afternoons. We were happy.”  
  
“It sounds good,” Sirius managed, throat closing. He remembered throwing a vase at Remus, the delicate porcelain shattering, orchids strewn across the floor. “You were happy?”  
  
Remus looked up at him with a strange, slow smile that reminded him forcibly of baring his throat for Moony. “If you had been a Death-Eater, if you had betrayed Lily and James, I would still be sitting in my kitchen with you, if you wanted it.”  
  
“You’ve been in the Order since we were eighteen.”  
  
“I’ve been in love with you since I was sixteen, so I think you’ll find you have the advantage there. Sirius. I’ve known you were innocent for over a year, and you’ve come to me on Dumbledore’s orders.”  
  
Sirius said, “It’s been fourteen years; I didn’t want to presume.”  
  
Remus set his fork down and reached across the table to take Sirius’ right hand carefully between his own. “It’s cruel to ask me to expect diffidence from you. Morgan’s tits, Sirius, presume.”


	4. Epilogue

For all you lovelies worrying about Almondine Weatherby’s tragic encounter with counterfeit love potions sold behind Dervish and Bangs in Knockturn Alley Aunt Gelda’s constant advice is, “Caution, my sweeties! That love is magical is a truth so evident that even Muggles are aware of it, and attempt to seek magic in their lives when in love. In the magic-user, love can assist in spells and enchantments, in creating bonds and wards, even in altering one’s magical core.” Let Almondine’s mishap be a message for all. Stop visiting the apothecary and offering dubious drinks. Rouge up your cheeks, add dimples to your smiles, bat your eyelashes till he doesn’t know where to look; and you will have bagged your man in three weeks or I didn’t have loving, warm relationships with all my husbands. Toodles!  
Gelda Greenhorn, ‘Ask Aunt Gelda’, _Witch Weekly, vol 56, no. 3_ , 1992

 

Remus made love with a careful solicitousness that left Sirius’ limbs heavy with satiation. It had been years since he had been touched with anything resembling care, and to be taken so tenderly to pieces brought him to the verge of tearful confession; it was comforting, afterward, to reflect on the fact that Remus knew everything already.


End file.
